Georg Jensen
Case Study
Introduction
Georg Jensen (GJ) is a Danish company with a long tradition of developing unique products of quality craftsmanship and timeless aesthetic design, ranging from watches, jewelry and home products.
When Georg Jensen established the collaboration with aety, Georg Jensen was interested in centralizing the management of user inquiries to their IT organization so they could better collaborate across departments, serve users better, and improve reporting.
At this time, Georg Jensen was using Jira Software (JSW) in the Cloud for their development projects and had a single Jira Service Management (JSM) project. Georg Jensen was not familiar with all of Jira’s functionalities at this time and therefore did not fully utilize the applications.
The problem
Georg Jensen faced a challenge in managing IT user inquiries and resolving them in a systematic way. At the time, the challenge was that Georg Jensen’s end users had to create service requests and incidents in their supplier’s ITSM system, which Georg Jensen’s Internal IT department used for case management. At the same time, users were contacting Internal IT via email with the same or other queries. This made the task difficult to handle as the information was scattered in both emails and the supplier’s ITSM system.
Another challenge of using the supplier’s ITSM system was that Georg Jensen was locked into the supplier’s way of setting up and configuring the ITSM system, which limited the possibilities to develop and mature Georg Jensen’s ITSM processes.
Georg Jensen is a global company and receives IT requests from users in different countries, but their ITSM setup at the time made it difficult to report on which countries the user requests originated from, which challenged Georg Jensen to allocate the necessary resources and funds to the countries.
In addition, the customer was unhappy with the way they handled customer inquiries internally. They needed a system where customer service could find all the relevant information about the request they received – easily and quickly. Previously, employees had to look up topics in multiple documents that were located in different places in multiple versions. As a result, the employee was not always able to identify the latest and correct variation of the document that they could use as a starting point. Therefore, the customer needed a single knowledge platform where all customer service agents could find relevant knowledge in the latest versions.
Last but not least, the customer wanted a tool where they could report on inquiries received by customer service. They wanted a way for employees to link operations and development to tasks while receiving regular status updates.
Product & Solution
Aety initially assisted Georg Jensen in implementing a Service Desk portal for end users, which acts as a single point of contact for all Georg Jensen users. This is regardless of whether the request is to be handled by Georg Jensen’s infrastructure supplier or whether it is Internal IT that handles the matter.
To support authentication and reporting capabilities, Aety helped set up JSM so that when a ticket is created, information about the user is retrieved from Azure AD (via automations) so that the ticket contains information about which department and country the user is from. If the case requires approval, Line Manager is also retrieved so that it can approve the request, e.g. when purchasing hardware/software.
Aety also helped configure a number of Jira Software projects so that Georg Jensen got closer and better collaboration between employees in operations and development. Specifically, the setup works so that cases created in the operations JSM project that turn out to be change requests or bugs in existing code result in a case being automatically created for the development department in JSW, which is linked to the operations case.
The smart thing is that the developer who has to solve the issue can communicate directly with the end user or operations employee by prefixing the comment. The synchronization of comments is created via Jira’s automation engine.
Aety assisted in implementing an integration to Georg Jensen’s supplier’s ITSM system, completely without the use of custom code. The integration is built entirely on Jira’s automation engine. The integration synchronizes cases between Jira and the supplier’s ITSM system, which means that Georg Jensen only needs to navigate Jira to get a complete overview of all ongoing cases, regardless of whether they are solved internally by Georg Jensen or the supplier.
Similarly, an integration between one of the JSW projects and a software development provider has also been created so that the project manager can hand over development tasks if there is no internal capacity to solve them.
Aety has also helped streamline Georg Jensen’s ITSM processes so that they are more standardized. This has given Georg Jensen the following benefits:
Onboarding new resources is easier when processes are consistent and approach industry standards. This is the case as new employees will often know the processes from other companies.
Maintaining workflows is easier in Jira.
When processes are standardized, there is better collaboration between the different departments.
Aety's approach
When the project started, Georg Jensen was in a transition phase, where the Danish IT department was to be expanded to become more of a global corporate function. There were therefore a number of work processes that were not fixed. This challenge was solved by aety facilitating several on-site workshops and ongoing prototyping, so Georg Jensen had the opportunity to review and think through the processes along the way.
When the system went live, there was less need for education/training on the new processes. They were already incorporated during the implementation of the new processes in Jira.
The implementation project has been carried out in a close collaboration rather than a traditional customer/supplier relationship.
Afterwards, several workshops were held where the working group participants were allowed to configure the systems on their own with the help of the consultants. This gave the customer the opportunity to train super users who got to know the systems inside out, while being able to decide how to configure the systems themselves.
During the process, aety, in collaboration with the working group, continuously identified issues that could be quickly resolved jointly, as all participants in the working group had a decision-making mandate. This had the advantage of shortening the configuration process, as the working group of decision-makers were in agreement with the ongoing changes and had no objections later in the process.
After the configuration of the 3 systems and the subsequent implementation, aety held several training sessions for a wider group of employees to teach them how to work in the systems. Since the implementation of JSM, Jira Software and Confluence, aety has had follow-up support tasks related to the initial configuration of the systems, as well as new requests that the customer has subsequently received.
Results
Georg Jensen can now see which departments and countries are reporting cases, so they know where to spend their development budget.
Shared overview and better reporting options.
Emails are no longer used to service users, as JSM’s service portal is used to service users instead.
Georg Jensen has established and works according to standardized processes.
Better correlation between users reporting bugs and defects and what developers spend their time on.
Georg Jensen’s IT PMO function has improved portfolio management capabilities through standardized processes and the new service portal
Integrations from JSW and JSM to Georg Jensen suppliers’ IT systems support agile task execution